The Armed Forces of the United States are legally bound to serve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States and the people. They do not swear loyalty to an individual leader or to a political movement or ideology. Any federal official attempting to compel the Armed Forces to serve the political or personal interests of the President, his political party, or a faction of his allies, is engaged in a conspiracy to subvert the Constitution and the republic.

It is the central founding principle of the United States of America that the republic is not owned by a monarch or a ruling family and can never be beholden to one political ideology. The republic belongs—as the word means in its original form—to the People. Those who serve in office owe their allegiance to the Constitution, to the People, to the rule of law, and to transcendent human rights. Use of public office to serve the personal or political interests of any individual, up to and including the President, is criminal corruption.

This applies to the military as well. The U.S. military, however, live by even stricter standards. Though it can be a crime to refuse to follow orders, when they are lawful, it can also be a crime to follow unlawful orders. Every member of the United States military is bound by the obligation never to serve an illegal purpose or misuse any military capability to advance any crime whatsoever.

To serve as “Commander in Chief”, to use the terminology of the Constitution, means that, when the Armed Forces are called to serve in wars lawfully declared and authorized by Congress—in line with the Constitution and all other binding laws, including Article VI treaties—then in that context, the President is responsible for overseeing the lawful use of the Armed Forces in the context of that lawfully declared war.

He is also responsible for ensuring the proper functioning of the Department of Defense and the proper administration of lawfully appropriated funds for the national defense. None of that means the President has dictatorial authority over the U.S. military. The President remains, in these as in all other matters, a servant of the law and of the People.

When the President of the United States says the U.S. military should use American cities for combat training, he is signaling an intent to issue illegal orders and to use military force for illegal coercive or punitive purposes, to advance unlawful aims. We may not yet know what those aims are, but we can know for certain that they are unlawful, because the President has no Constitutional authority to declare war, no formal responsibility in local law enforcement, and no legal authority to order the U.S. military to attack civilians on American soil.

When Mr. Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, concluded his own political rant in front of hundreds of assembled Generals and Admirals, he paused to wait for the kind of applause one would expect at a political party’s nominating convention. No such applause followed. The most senior officers in the United States military know they are, like all uniformed military personnel, prohibited by law from engaging in political campaign events or from boosting political rhetoric.

The silence of the Generals and Admirals was the lawful, patriotic, and organizationally appropriate response to the Secretary’s ramblings.

• Secretary Hegseth’s indirect and direct insults to some military personnel were abusive and inappropriate.
• His attempts to invoke applause and celebration of a book he wrote were possibly an unlawful abuse of the office.
• His insinuations that the military should be looking for opportunities to engage in combat suggest lawlessness.
• His use of the forum to threaten removal of senior officers for ideological reasons was inexcusable.

Regardless, military officers should not congratulate those who wield political rhetoric. There are many reasons for this, but above all is the sworn legal obligation to be of service to all Americans, without consideration of any characteristic, including political views or party affiliation.

There is no lawful way for the President or the Secretary of Defense—or anyone else—to order deployment of active duty U.S. military personnel to play any role in policing, attacking, or “waging war” against American citizens in American cities and communities.

Those who serve in uniform put their lives and safety, and the comfort and stability of their familiy’s experience of a rooted home, on the line, to ensure the safety and security, and freedom, of everyone else. They deserve far better than to be insulted, defamed, and told that their duties will be altered by a regime operating outside the law to include the most egregious of all crimes—waging war against their own country and its civilian population.

That is the kind of thing history’s most lawless, unforgivable dictators did. It cannot be a function of the U.S. military.